Sakes With Sock -- Coming To Terms With Upscale Tastes

Good Spirits

With upscale sakes sweeping the country, America's wine aficionados have to learn a new vocabulary, adopt a new set of assumptions. We can't let this thing get ahead of us, can we?

Premium sakes are often served in wine glasses to allow the swirling and sniffing that U.S. wine fans do to test a new drink. These sakes are served cool, about 57 degrees. (Cheaper sakes are served at about 105 degrees to mask their flaws.) But upscale eateries use all kinds of vessels, from square cedar boxes to ceramic cups to carafes carved out of bamboo.

Sakes don't necessarily have the fruity flavors of wine. Why would they? They're made of rice. Japanese tasters evaluate them more in terms of fragrance (from none to fragrant), impact (from quiet to explosive), sweetness (from sweet to dry), acidity (from soft to puckery), presence (from unassuming to full), complexity (from straightforward to complex), earthiness (from delicate to dank) and tail, or finish (from quickly vanishing to pervasive).

Sakes are brewed, like beer, but from rice, not barley. Brown rice is milled to remove its husk and bran, wear away the fatty acids and proteins and leave only its starchy core. It is soaked, then steamed, then inoculated with koji, then inoculated with yeast and left to ferment to an alcohol level of 17 percent to 20 percent. After being pasteurized, the sake is diluted with water to its final alcohol level of 13 percent to 17 percent.

Here are some terms you'll see on sake lists:

- Junmai (JUNE-my) sake is the most prevalent style in America. It is made with no extra alcohol, unlike hanjozo (hahn-JOE-zo) sakes, which do have alcohol added. Junmai sakes come in three levels of quality -- regular, ginjo (GIN-joe) and daiginjo (DIE-gin-joe).

- Junmai regular sake, the most basic level of quality, is made of rice that has been milled to 70 percent of its original size, removing proteins and fatty acids that make sake harsh and promote hangovers.

- Junmai Ginjo sake, the next higher level of quality, is of rice milled to about 60 percent of its original size, removing more of the unwanted qualities.

- Daiginjo sake, the top level, is of rice milled to less than 50 percent of its size, leaving only the pristine, starchy core.

- Nigori (nih-GORE-ee) sakes, made with added sugar, are sweet, often served with desserts; they're also cloudy with rice residue, having been only roughly filtered.

Sakes are measured on a sweet/dry scale in which 20 is the driest, 0 is neutral and -20 is the sweetest. These are sometimes listed on the bottle.